Yet another FPS shooter is
released into this somewhat crowded market. Raven are well
known as the makers of Heretic and Hexen games. Has their
latest game, Soldier of Fortune got what it takes to stand out
above the rest ? If so, why so ? Read on.

Story

You're
John Mullins, the world's deadliest soldier of fortune and
your mission is clear: survive. Track your prey across the
globe in a series of secret missions to take down a fanatical
terrorist organization - before it takes you down. Maintain
your cover as a covert warrior in a startling variety of
explosive missions ranging from underhanded sabotage to
stealthy assassination to full frontal assaults where skill
marks the difference between the hunter and the hunted.
Welcome to the secret world of the mercenary. At least that'd
what Activision says about it.

Like
most good action films you can cut this "wrapping"
off and summarize it like this. 4 nukes have been stolen by a
mad terrorist group with intentions of world domination, find
them and get the bad guys behind it. Use whatever
means are necessary, those means usually involve punching
holes through people with high caliber weapons. Are we excited
yet :) ?

Getting it running

No problems at all with this,
although I felt it should be mentioned as I installed and ran
this game in Windows 2000. After installing the latest
WickedGL it even ran quite well on this backup system of mine
(Pentium 233MMX, 128MB RAM). There was no custom installation
option though and it required 700MB or so of free space to
install on the NTFS partition.

During the install you can
read information about John Mullins (the character you play in
the game), I found that to be quite interesting (I thought so
at least). pretty nice touch.

Raven
recommends that you play this game after you have logged in as
a Power User, not as
Administrator. My experience is that it made no noticeable
difference.

Graphics

Given
the setup that I ran the game on I had to change a few
settings to find a good trade off between beauty and speed. I
was very happy with how it looked even after that and turned
up the details/resolution after that just to see how
well it could really look. It's hard to believe that this is
the Quake 2 engine in action, Raven were right to say the
engine is "Quake 2.9".

Raven have added their
"Ghoul" rendering system and it allows for many
stunning effects in the game and other nice touches such as
advanced lighting and hit location based damage. You can read
detail information about the Ghoul rendering system at Raven.

While
location based damage is nothing new (Sin had it for example),
this game offers true
visible benefits to aiming for specific locations, e.g. Up
close firing a shotgun blast at someone’s legs will blow a
leg off, which is instant death. Aim for the head, the head
should come clean off, or half off depending on your aim.
Different weapons have different effects however, don't expect
to chop a limb of with a throwing knife or 9mm.